Re: [PATCH] regex: not all macOS platforms seem to have REG_ENHANCED

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 20, 2026, 01:30 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqv7ergud0.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <6cd35848-a234-40dc-bb87-4c2cb7eff52c@web.de>

René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de> writes:

Show 13 quoted lines

> On 3/19/26 11:37 PM, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>> Earlier, 54463d32 (use enhanced basic regular expressions on macOS,
>> 2023-01-08) started to use the REG_ENHANCED option when ERE is not
>> in use on macOS.  The build seems to have started failing on
>> macos-14 CI jobs at GitHub, however, as apparently not all the macOS
>> platforms have this flag defined.
>
> Interesting.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history says
> macOS 14 (Sonoma) was released 2023-09-26, i.e. more than eight months
> after the patch.  And the oldest regex(3) man page I could find also
> mentions REG_ENHANCED:
>
> https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=regex&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=macOS+10.12.0&format=html

Well, I have no idea where this breakage came from; it suddenly started in today's pushout, and I do not think we have made any changes on our end to cause it.

E.g., https://github.com/git/git/actions/runs/23315793655/job/67814861386#step:4:301

In any case, in the same CI run, a few other jobs on osx- that uses the same macos-14 image seem to be passing, so I am reasonably sure that the posted patch is a *bad* idea. Instead of forcing us to figure out why REG_ENHANCED is missing, it would just hide the problem under the rug, possibly breaking a random regex tests that happen to depend on the "enhanced mode" working. X-<.